Nearing your Gmail storage limit? Attack your photos instead
At that point, all sorts of bad things can happen: email can be throttled or halted entirely, photos won’t be backed up to Google Photos, Google Drive won’t be synced, and even your Android phone data won’t be backed up. If you happen to be part of a family plan, those limits affect not just you, but anyone on it.
Welcome to PCWorld’s newsletter, Smart Mode! The focus of this newsletter is productivity: from software to hardware to peripherals, all with the idea to get what you need to get done, efficiently.
I’m your host, Mark Hachman, covering the productivity tips, tools, and trends that you need to know about, both from within PCWorld and beyond. If you want the latest issue in your inbox each week, just sign up right here.
Ordinarily, I keep my Gmail inbox manageable. I know how to organize my Gmail inbox, but more how importantly, how to keep my Gmail inbox quota low by finding and deleting old email. What those stories ignore is that your quota now consists of all of your storage: Gmail, Drive, Photos, and more. A quick email from your uncle or a note from your pharmacist doesn’t take up nearly as much space as a photo (or video!) of the friendly neighborhood dog.
Over the past few months PCWorld has begun shooting more long-form and short-form video for both our PCWorld Tiktok channel and YouTube. They’re fun opportunities for us to tell you directly what we think, show off gear, teach you tricks, and so on. We have the option of using our own phones to give it that cinema verite aesthetic, and so we do.
The problem? All that video — all those takes — eats up space on our phones, my phone included. All that video then gets quietly backed up. All that space gets taken up. And then a certain wife, who quietly went though the roof after spending days deleting old email only to find that her “family” data quota kept growing, bit the bullet and paid Google $20 more for 200GB of additional data storage…three hours before I sat down to write this newsletter. Sigh.
But here’s the weird part: Google encourages you to use certain tools to manage your storage quota as you approach that limit…but then hides or downplays those tools otherwise. Here’s what you can and should be using to manage your storage, no matter how much you have left.
Learn to use Google’s Storage Manager
Begin by going to the Google One Storage Manager. (You can perform these tasks on your phone, but I think the PC offers a more easily navigable interface.)
